


Beast Besotted

by faedemon



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics), Rappaccini's Daughter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe, Beast Wirt, Body Horror, Character Death, Crushes, Escape, Family Dynamics, Florists, Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Murder, and its more like... mistreatment than real abuse, but not in the way you think!, for the most part this is a friendship kind of fic, it's not anyone you care about i promise, rappaccini's daughter au, the abuse isnt explicit, the wirt/beatrice is very very slight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2019-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:28:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21518902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faedemon/pseuds/faedemon
Summary: The girl that comes into view is hardly girl and more creature. From her limbs sprout glossy blue feathers, her eyes even from here visibly the beady black nothing that a bluebird’s are. Her hair, bright orange like the feathers at her breast, is pinned up, and around the borders of her face sprout feathers that frame her features. It is a beautiful amalgam of human and avian, and it is terrible, and Wirt can’t decide whether to step back from the window or toward it, mouth fallen open in awe.Or, Wirt and Greg move to a new city, and next door to their new home is a garden, and in it resides a girl unlike anyone Wirt has ever seen. She is beautiful, sort of. She is entirely enchanting. He can't not save her.An OTGW Rappaccini's Daughter AU. The concept is lifted almost entirely from Nathaniel Hawthorne's work, but you don't need to have read it to understand this fic. It stands alone.
Relationships: Beatrice & Gregory & Wirt (Over the Garden Wall), Beatrice & Wirt (Over the Garden Wall), Beatrice/Wirt (Over the Garden Wall), Gregory & Wirt (Over the Garden Wall)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 35
Collections: my best fics





	Beast Besotted

**Author's Note:**

> This story was previously titled _what you saw in the garden that day_. As of 5/19/2020, it's been changed to _Beast Besotted_.
> 
> In addition, this work is cross-posted on FFN under the username faedemonn and can be found [here](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13574550/1/what-you-saw-in-the-garden-that-day).

The brownstone that looms before him is both intimidating and beautiful, in its carved, rugged visage, and as Wirt approaches the stone steps that lead to its great, wooden door, he thinks that it is closer to an old beast than a home.

Greg stands at his side, eleven years old and beaming, rocking back and forth from his heels to his toes. He, like Wirt, carries a brown suitcase in one hand, heavy and snapped shut with bright metal locks. He, unlike Wirt, looks eager to step through the front door, eager to explore this new place.

Greg’s father, Wirt’s stepfather, received a job offer at the University of Padua under one Professor Whispers in the Department of Medicine, and uprooted their family from its home in Naples to settle here, in this grand old house on a busy, dirty road. Before, they had lived in a modest place tucked in a grove of trees. Here, every window’s view will be gray and brown, and the streets will stink of horse droppings so thoroughly that it’ll sink into the brick and mortar.

To the right of the brownstone is a florist, a short, subtle building with a flat above it that evidently gets a lot of business, despite its humble décor. Wirt makes an internal note to visit sometime; their selection, from what he can see on display in the windows, is rather charming.

To the left stands a high, featureless wall that spans the length of two normal facades, a small alley running between it and Wirt’s new home. At the other end of the wall, another brownstone is erected, this one pressed flush to its border. Wirt imagines that whomever owns what lies beyond the wall lives there.

“Come on, brother-o-mine, haven’t we stood around out here long enough?” Greg suddenly chirps, startling Wirt out of his contemplations. Looking at Greg, his small stature and his soft, giving demeanor, he’s reminded why he’s still here. Wirt is eighteen. He could have left by now to buy his own place and make his own name, but he hasn’t. He wants to watch Greg grow up. Needs to, really. Needs to know the kid won’t collapse inward from his own, inherent self-sacrifice. 

“Sure,” Wirt says lamely, hefting his suitcase up from where he’d allowed himself to set it down. “Lead the way.”

Their parents have already come and gone from this place, having had Wirt and Greg laid up with their grandparents while most of the moving was being done. Greg’s father works during the days, and Wirt’s mother has taken up with some women’s club, leaving Wirt and Greg to while away the afternoons with each other. Their grandparents dropped them off today, on the doorstep of their unfamiliar home, and left, horse carriage trotting and tumbling away. Watching them go, two gleaming, shitting horses at the front and a sharp driver guiding them, Wirt had been reminded of how grossly wealthy their family really is. He tends to forget, because his mother grew up poor and Greg’s father saves every dime he can. Neither of their parents know how to live richly. Their grandparents only indulge because old age demands nothing more than wholehearted indulgence, soul unwound after years of being high-strung.

This brownstone is the first expensive thing Greg’s father has ever bought, and even then, it wasn’t the most expensive property on the street. In fact, it was cheapest, and the landlady that sold them the property entirely, wiping her hands of the place, told them it was because of what rested next door.

_Tenants can’t sleep because of the creaking, most nights,_ Wirt had heard her say, sitting at the table in the kitchen of their modest country house. She’d traveled down to Naples to see them after she got their letter. When Wirt’s mother asked why, she’d only said she needed to get away. _That garden might be the worst thing that ever happened to Lombard. Are you sure you want to buy it?_

Greg’s father had waved it all off. It was fine, he insisted. A few rustles in the dead of night is no price to pay for a job at the University.

Wirt himself was skeptical, when he first heard her speaking. The woman probably slept there a few nights too many. She was getting on in age, anyhow. Auditory hallucinations, maybe. Delusions. The tenants probably left to be away from her.

The foyer Wirt and Greg step into echoes with the clack of their shoes. The entryway yawns with emptiness. Wirt’s family does not have enough possessions to fill up this house.

“I get first dibs on the bedroom!” Greg shouts, all too suddenly, and books it upstairs, taking it two steps at a time. Wirt curses and follows, hopping up the steps just in time to watch Greg disappear into a room at the end of the hall. The floors up here are wood, unlike the stone of the foyer, and Wirt’s suitcase makes a satisfying, muffled _thunk_ when he sets it just to the side of the staircase. “Oh, I like this one!” Wirt hears Greg say, and he steps into view of the doorway Greg disappeared into to see him rummaging through a closet, of which, there are two. Dusty boxes are piled in the one Greg is investigating.

_Excessive_, Wirt thinks, looking at the closets, before turning to the other doors. There are three more along the hallway. The one closest to the stairs opens into a barren bedroom, one wide window on the wall. Of the other two, one is a bathroom, and the second is another bedroom, though this one is piled with things. It looks rather large, so it must be the master; judging by the things littering the floor, their parents have already claimed it.

Wirt turns to the bedroom closest to the stairs and steps inside, looking around. It’s a simple room, with cream walls, a rough wooden desk, a single, unmade bed, and an empty closet. The wall across from the door is occupied only by the window he’d noted earlier, and would be uninteresting, were it not for the view Wirt comes upon as he steps closer.

He hadn’t realized it before, but this window overlooks the great wall visible from the road, and what’s inside is a garden. He hadn’t connected it before, but the garden the old landlady had spoken of must be this one—there is no other spot of green in sight.

It’s an impressive garden, but an unruly one. Wherever Wirt looks, roots and vines and plants twist and twine into each other. The cobblestone paths that crisscross it are almost entirely covered, and he’d imagine them to be totally impossible to navigate if not for the woman that appears, suddenly, from an archway at the far wall.

She is probably in her forties, based on her facial features, or what Wirt can make out from his vantage point, but the way she walks makes her seem much older. She seems stiff, and though she picks her way between vines and roots with practiced steps, she does so with visible effort. Wirt watches her stop before different plants, one at a time, sampling flowers’ petals and vines’ leaves and bits of soil from around every growth, slowly circling closer and closer to the center of the garden, where rests a marble fountain, cracked straight through the center. From that crack grows a tree, and though no leaves grow from it even in this dead-center of spring, it seems inexplicably alive. Its wooden roots creep out from the marble, twisting along the paths, and before Wirt rationalizes that the other plants must contribute, he thinks fleetingly that this thing must be the cause of each root that crosses the cobblestones.

Eventually the woman, who is dressed in a dark cloak and heavy boots and gloves, not an inch of skin showing apart from her face, reaches at last the marble fountain. She had not once stopped before this to simply _look_ at a plant, at least without a sharp, examining eye, but she does so to this one. From his window, Wirt watches her in profile, and he can see her lips form a single word, gazing up at it, though he cannot make out what it is she speaks.

She reaches out toward the wooden trunk of it, but stops before she gets more than halfway, and pulls her arm back to her chest. Then she turns toward the archway, at the wall that must be pressed against that other brownstone Wirt had caught sight of, and calls for someone so loudly he can hear it through the glass.

“Beatrice!” she calls, looking up at a dark window visible over the far wall. “Beatrice!”

A figure appears beyond the glass, though the silhouette is too dark for Wirt to make out any of its features. A shadowed hand pulls the window open, and from it, a sweet voice calls, “Coming, Adelaide!” The figure disappears, retreating into the shadows of the house.

Not a minute later, a new person emerges through the archway at the far end of the garden, and this woman, a girl really, takes Wirt’s breath away. It is both good and not good, beautiful and not beautiful, and the feeling that churns in his gut is part attraction, part revulsion, part desperate intrigue.

The girl that comes into view is hardly girl and more creature. From her limbs sprout glossy blue feathers, her eyes even from here visibly the beady black nothing that a bluebird’s are. Her hair, bright orange like the feathers at her breast, is pinned up, and around the borders of her face sprout feathers that frame her features. It is a beautiful amalgam of human and avian, and it is terrible, and Wirt can’t decide whether to step back from the window or toward it, mouth fallen open in awe.

She’s gorgeous. She’s terrifying.

Transfixed, Wirt watches as the woman—Adelaide—gestures sharply toward the tree. “You’re to tend to this one by yourself from now on,” she tells the girl, Beatrice. “You understand?”

“Of course,” Beatrice responds, with perfect pleasantry. Something about her words sound hollow to Wirt, though. Untruthful. He wonders idly what their relation is; mother and daughter? Master and apprentice? Caretaker and ward?

No matter which label applies, their relationship is visibly tense; the line of Beatrice’s body is rigid, clenched, and the look Adelaide bestows on her is closer to the way a person looks at a hammer or fork than the way one looks at another person.

The girl Beatrice moves to the tree after a short moment, running a bare hand up the length of its bark, reaching toward something Wirt had not yet noticed—a bud, plump and this close to bursting, its outer shell a brown accurate enough to blend in with the bark. Now that he knows what he’s looking for, he sees them all over the spindly branches of the tree, dotted across its limbs like freckles, though the one Beatrice caresses is one of the two largest. These two rest in the sort-of center of the trunk, sprouting straight from its side, just below the crown of the tree at which the branches fork away proper. These are much grander than any other bud, and Wirt imagines once they blossom, they will be impressive flowers indeed.

Letting the bud go, she trails her hand along one of the branches, and promptly plucks a smaller bud, placing it into a container Adelaide holds out for her. She does the same with some of the tree’s bark, and samples its sap, and after the woman is satisfied with her specimens, she goes off, wading through the dense tangle of vine and root on the paths to return to the other brownstone, through the archway. Beatrice lingers, however, in the dying sunlight, and as Wirt watches, the sun moves just so that a shaft of light falls across her.

The way her feathers catch the sun in turn catch Wirt entirely off-guard. They’re like sunsets on their own, blues catching oranges and yellows to make a dastardly shimmer of beauty, the orange feathers at her breast highlighted in a way Wirt cannot hope to take his eyes off of. He’s enchanted, entranced, this vile beast of a girl is a celestial body, radiant, eternal, and he is the hopeless astronomer charting her. Without his conscious desire, he’s reaching for the window latch, throwing the glass open so as to catch a glimpse of her undistorted, pure.

And then there’s a stumbling from behind him, and a _clang_, and Wirt whips around in guilty surprise to find Greg fallen face-first on the floor of the bedroom, a metal tea kettle stuck on his foot. He raises a head up and grins at Wirt sheepishly.

“I was pretending to be a gobbler but I didn’t have any extra shoes, so I used some things I found in the boxes in my room, and now I have this stuck on my foot. I hopped over here to ask if you could get it off,” Greg rambles, a flow of words Wirt can barely comprehend. He glances back out the window and sees Beatrice gone from the garden, the lush green almost gray in comparison to the remnant of blue-orange stained in his vision.

“Do you mean cobbler?” Wirt ask-corrects, weakly, still thinking of her eyes, her feathers, her hair like the sun. Improbable, impossible.

“Sure! I want my foot free, please, though, Wirt,” he says, and this startles Wirt out of his haze, and he scrambles forward to help his brother out of his predicament.

“What was a kettle even doing in your closet?” he asks, bewildered, and Greg brightens, his foot coming unstuck.

“Oh! I think a mad scientist must have lived here, Wirt, because there’s all sorts of things in those boxes. Come look!” He stands, wobbling only slightly on his now-even feet, and grabs at Wirt’s hand to drag him out of the room and down the hall.

Greg lets him go at the threshold to the room he’s claimed and bolts for one of the closets, the one at the left. There are five or six boxes piled there, one of which Greg’s pulled down and rummaged through. Coming up behind him, Wirt sees a number of things in the box, circled around a kettle-shaped empty space. There are little jars and glass vials, most of which contain some kind of substance. Some look like crushed herbs or plant matter, others are totally unrecognizable sludge. He leans over Greg’s shoulder to pull one out, and though there is a label stuck to the glass, something was splattered across it, and whatever was written there is illegible now. Picking out vial after jar after container, Wirt sees that each label befell the same fate.

“Odd,” he murmurs as Greg shakes a jar of sludge, watching it drip down the inside. “Don’t play with it, Greg, you don’t know what it is. It could be poisonous.” He pauses. Then, “Actually, if it wasn’t poisonous at first, it probably is now, with how long it’s been sitting here.” Greg pouts, but puts the vial back.

“Okay. There’s more in the other boxes, wanna look in them?” Greg asks, excitement immediately returning to him. Wirt nods his assent, and they go through the rest of the boxes, yielding things like beakers, chemistry equipment, microscopes, petri dishes, and the tea set that must accompany the kettle.

“A scientist must have lived here, Greg, but I don’t think he was _mad_,” Wirt says gently. Greg stills, then furrows his brows.

“Oh. Okay.” They sit there for a moment, before Greg hops back into motion. “I’m going to go explore!” And without any warning, he darts off. Wirt listens to his footsteps slamming down the stairs.

Since Greg has apparently claimed the “mad scientist” room, Wirt is left with the one that overlooks the garden. He retrieves his suitcase from the top of the staircase and reenters the room, looking upon it with new eyes. He can see the places he’ll put his books, his trinkets, where he’ll pin up papers of poetry, to-do lists, his notes of study. It all appears before him, a life, and the only thing that breaks his vision is that wide, bright glass just across from him, out of place against the cozy, secluded space he’s built in his mind.

He crosses the room to the window, setting his suitcase down by his feet. The glass is still propped open, the bottom pane swinging outward, and from it a slight breeze ruffles Wirt’s hair. Too from it comes a noise, a faint thing, almost imperceptible, really—but because he’s so singularly focused on the garden, it reaches him, registers apart from the world’s white noise that his ears are blind to. It’s a low, slow _creaking_, like that of a house’s supports slowly bending. And it’s not a singular sound, but one continuous, reaching, moving, creeping. It slithers into his ears like some rough serpent, and a sudden panic grips Wirt; he shuts the window, latches it tight as it will go, presses his hands against the seal between the glass and the sill, desperate to block out that slick sound.

When silence falls upon the room, his shoulders relax, feeling as though they had held a great weight, somehow. He lets his forehead rest against the glass, cooling in the oncoming evening, and after a moment pushes himself away, set to begin unpacking.

<> 

A few hours later, when the sun has just gone down and darkness has ensconced the garden, invisible now to Wirt’s lingering gaze, there’s a knock at the door.

Greg runs to answer it as Wirt comes down the stairs, and as the door opens, a truly ugly, older woman comes into view, smiling wanly down at Greg. She does not show her teeth.

“You must be the little one,” she says, and Wirt sees immediately why she’d kept her lips closed, for her teeth—what’s left of them—are black and rotting. She reaches out to pat Greg on the head in a manner condescending enough it makes Wirt wants to grind his teeth. As he reaches the bottom step, she looks up and makes eye contact with him, her smile stretching thinner. “And you must be Wirt. Your father has mentioned you.”

“Who are you?” he asks in response, one hand lingering on the smooth banister as it curls around itself at the base of the staircase.

“I’m Dr. Whispers, the Professor your father works under. I hoped to catch him at home. I take it he’s not currently here?”

“No,” Wirt says, narrowing his eyes. There’s something slimy about this woman, he can see it in her eyes, and he doesn’t like it. “He isn’t. I imagine he’s picking up my mother. He should be back soon enough. Would you care to stay until he returns?”

“Oh, no, I don’t want to impose. It’s nothing I can’t speak to him about at the University tomorrow. While I was here I simply wanted to mention to him, ah, about his neighbor…” she trails off, eyes darting to the side, toward the direction the garden lies. Wirt almost startles with his interest, and he fights the urge to jump forward and shout.

“Do you mean the person who owns the garden next door?”

“The Doctor Adelaide,” Whispers confirms, looking sharply to Wirt. “You must have taken the room with the window, then. You saw her at work?”

He ignores her question, focusing instead on the detail before it. “How do you know there’s a room with a window overlooking it?” he queries, stepping forward and putting a hand on Greg’s shoulder.

“I used to own this house, boy. It was a scholars’ neighborhood, once upon a time. The Doctor Adelaide and I are sisters, by trade and by blood. I know all there is to know about her, enough so that I know she’s a husk of a woman. Everything is an experiment to her. Everything is a test, even her own ward, the poor girl.”

“Those are your things in the closet upstairs, then!” Greg interjects, grinning. “You’re the mad scientist!”

Whispers’ sharpness smooths as she looks down at Greg, and she smiles back at him gently. “Ah, yes. I moved out of this house a long time ago, though. It was only coincidence that your father bought it; the woman I sold it to rented it out for many years. I’m surprised my things are still around. There’s a tea set, correct, and many glass vials?”

“Yes!”

“Yes, that will be mine. You’re free to use them. I have not needed them for this long; I should hardly seek to claim them now.”

“What’s in those jars?” Wirt asks, thinking of the gross-looking sludge. “Is it dangerous at all?”

She looks back to him. “If I remember correctly, it’s nothing harmful. Just some herbs and plant matter. You might not want to touch the poultices, though, I’m sure they’ve grown mold after this long.” She cracks a black grin, as if it were a funny joke. “I used to dabble in botany, but that was always more of Adelaide’s field. I’m much more well-suited to the chemical aspect of medicine.”

“I see,” Wirt says, his hand clenching on Greg’s shoulder. “If that will be all?”

“Of course. I’ll darken your doorstep no longer.” She takes the hint, and steps back, out of the threshold. “Do tell your father I said hello.”

“He’s not _my_ father,” Wirt tells her, and shuts the door, that old insecurity rearing up in him. He got over his feelings of inadequacy regarding his birth father a long time ago, but he and Greg’s dad have never been very close. The amount of times she referred to him as _his_ father had begun to grate on the ear.

Undoubtedly she’ll repeat his outburst to the man in question later, and Wirt will have to answer to it, but for now, his stepfather is still out on the streets, hunting down his mother, with no idea of Professor Whispers’ visit.

Wirt stares at the imposing figure of the door for a moment, looming heavy and sedate in its frame, before releasing Greg’s shoulder and patting his back. “Come on, Greg,” he says, his voice less strained. “Let’s go make some food.”

“Okay, Wirt,” Greg replies, his voice slightly subdued. As Wirt turns to head down the hall, Greg takes hold of his sleeve, and he looks back. Greg looks at the floor, his lips pressed thin. “Am I your brother, Wirt?”

Wirt’s face twists, regret pooling in his stomach, filling right up to his throat. “Oh, Greg.” A lump there, just beyond the cavity of his mouth, prevents his next words from spilling out just long enough to make the guilt pool even higher. “Yes—yes, you’re my brother. I’m your brother.” He reaches out to tug the kid to his chest, eleven and still tiny, still with baby fat on his cheeks. “I promise.”

“Is that a rock fact?”

“It’s a _fact_, Greg. A real, normal fact.”

“Okay.” Greg burrows into Wirt’s chest, returning the hug at last. “I’m hungry. Let’s make food.” His voice is muffled in the fabric of Wirt’s vest, but it’s warm, and the relief, golden, that sweeps through Wirt is near shattering.

Their parents make it back just in time for Wirt to serve the meatloaf he and Greg made together, and that night, Wirt’s mother tucks Greg in to his new bed in his new room, possessions flung about in some facsimile of decoration. Wirt watches through the doorway, leaning against the frame, a smile on his face without his conscious permission. When Greg had first come into his life, Wirt couldn’t stand him. Now, he feels almost as though Greg is his own child, like his big-brother instinct had peaked and become fatherly.

They have not yet bought lamps for the house, so on her way out, Wirt’s mother blows out the candle that Wirt had set up hours earlier. He joins her, walking away down the hall, and they stop at the banister overlooking the entryway, just off the staircase.

“Have you stopped in at the florists’ next door yet?” she asks him, and he remembers the shop he’d caught sight of on his way in. In his single-minded intrigue regarding Adelaide’s garden, he’d forgotten entirely what lay on the other side of their brownstone. “I hear they’re hiring.”

“Really?” he wonders, looking down at the front door, at the small windows that border its arch. Beyond them is total darkness, as night is wont to cause. He feels, childishly, as though he’s not supposed to be awake. “I’ll stop by tomorrow, then.”

“Good,” she says, and kisses his cheek before bidding him good-night. He smiles at her, watching her retreat to the master, shutting the door behind her. With Greg asleep—he can already hear the sweet snores drifting down the hall from the last room—and his mother’s door closed, he feels like the only person in the world still awake.

Nothing more to attend to, he retreats as well to his own bedroom, which by now he’s decorated at least somewhat. His sheets he’s fitted to the bed, his books he’s propped up in the corner of the desk. Some of his poetry is pinned to the wall above his bed, and during the afternoon he’d stepped out into town to purchase a small, circular rug for the center of his floor, the wood too cold for his tastes.

Earlier, the candles all still lit, the light of the house had been too much to make out anything beyond the glass of their windows. Now, with every candle blown out, the small moonlight outside illuminates the faint edges of shapes in the dark. Of the garden, he can see the top bricks of the wall, and the white marble curve of the fountain. He can almost, almost make out the dark shapes of leaves and vines, but the rest is too indistinct for his eyes to define, and he leans back, away from the window, almost disappointed.

And then something burns bright in the dark, and Wirt is arrested by its vision.

In the rough center of the garden, just above the white curve of marble that he can just make out, a bright, blue-white-yellow-pink something appears, shining like a lantern in the night. It unfurls like a fern, like petals, opening into a roughly circular shape, and set against the night it’s like a will-o-the-wisp, like some angelic visitor. And then another one comes into view, just next to the first, and they burn, the both of them, looking so peculiarly like eyes. And Wirt meets them, and it’s like he’s looking into something, and it’s not an angelic visitor but one malevolent, one slick and creeping, like oil, like the shimmer of poisonous things.

And then there are more, smaller, dotting the night, all the same rings of bright, blinding color, all _looking_ at him, all dastardly. They hover above the marble fountain, still, searching.

And there is a creaking. Wirt is suddenly, irreversibly conscious of it, and it feels as though it’s in his bones. Its like wood, swaying in a storm, bending just too far, bark straining at its uneven seams. It’s like ripping, like tearing, like growing and swelling and the sound of it is like something _entering_ Wirt, something creeping inside and living in the hollow cavity of his chest, and he wants to vomit, and he wants to run, and

And then he’s waking up, on the wooden floor just shy of the rug he’d purchased yesterday, head pounding like anything. Light streams in from the window above him. It’s quiet.

It’s quiet.

He sits up, pressing on his temple, looking around blearily. It’s not wildly early, but early enough his family is probably still asleep. He stands, and, remembering the previous night, whips his head to look outside, down into the garden. It had seemed like a beast in the darkness, like something unknowable. Like a fantasy.

He’d looked upon the garden in a distorted vision of malice, late at night and tired, and now in the daylight it seems disappointingly benign. The only feature of note are the blossoms on that barren tree poking out of the crack of the fountain, buds no longer. Their blooms are shaped like that of hydrangeas, the small petals changing hue as they grow closer to the center, forming rings of color peculiar but unmarred by any sense of maliciousness. Whatever had made them seem to glow in the darkness is invisible now, and all Wirt looks upon is a perfectly normal, unremarkable garden.

Disappointingly benign, indeed.

Later, after lunch, by which time Wirt’s father has left for work and his mother has taken Greg to school and then gone off on her own pursuits, Wirt pays visit to the florist’s next door.

It is run, he discovers, by a married couple who each own half of the store. Each side is built with strikingly different architecture, but they sell roughly the same product. As it is told to him, they were once two separate florists, but, when they were accidentally both leased the same storefront, fell in love and decided to become business partners. Thus was born the Endigrey Floral Boutique, staffed by Margueritte Grey, Quincy Endicott, and their wayward son Fred, who has been arrested for petty theft no less than four times now.

Such is the tale told by Grey and Endicott themselves, giggling and clutching each other’s hands all the while, making for a charming and exceedingly annoying picture. It’s only after they’ve shared their life story that Wirt can manage to inquire about work.

“Oh, yes! We have been in need of a delivery boy. Fred’s been doing it, but he gets very overwhelmed, as he also cleans and cashiers and counts stock and advertises. He’s a very dependable boy.” She reaches across the counter they’re gathered around, at which a very bored-looking boy stands, chin resting in his hand, hardly listening to the conversation. When Margueritte pinches his cheek, he starts, and swats her hand away, though she takes no apparent offense to it. “Can you start today?”

“Today?” Wirt repeats, off-guard. “I, uh. I guess?”

“Splendid! There’s an order put in by Mrs. Delacourt on Elms, do you think you can take it over?” She reaches behind the counter and pulls out a brown apron, on which is sewn “Endigrey” in an arc above a small, embroidered image of a bouquet. Wirt takes it, bewildered, and slips it over his head, tying the string at his waist. “Oh, you look just so!”

“I’ll… do my best,” he says firmly, taking the arrangement Fred pulls out for him; a white and blue-themed bouquet.

Over the next hours is a whirlwind of work, countless bundles of flowers and flower-adjacent product pushed into his hands before being pushed out the door, cycle repeat. And all the while, holding the stems of those flowers, even through the paper wrapping, all he can seem to think of is Beatrice. Beatrice’s hands, feathers poking from their backs, her fingers, nimbly plucking samples from that gnarled, barren tree. That tree now bloomed without leaves.

Beatrice, that creature of a girl, whom he had caught but a bare glimpse of.

When he leaves the store at late afternoon, his name written down in the Endigrey’s books and with an order to come at eight sharply the next morning, he leaves with a small but not insignificant bundle of forget-me-nots. He’s not entirely sure why he purchased them, though a small, fanciful desire in him wishes that he might give them to her. Beatrice. The bird girl, the girl in the garden. She, unknown and unknowable, a beast and a human. Part of him, a large part, wants to give her flowers.

His face burns as he takes the steps up to his front door, one hand pressed over his mouth and nose, a grin playing on his lips despite himself. He shuts the door behind him and sinks against the wood, eyes closed, flowers clutched tight in one hand. A breathy chuckle escapes him, his heart beating despite no action having been taken. God, he’s seen her _once_. How is it she has such an effect on him? What is it about her that makes his heart race, despite his stomach churning at the appearance of those feathers grown so grotesquely from her skin?

He’s startled out of his musing by Greg, home from school for a few hours now, who barrels into him, hugging him around the waist. He barely comes up to Wirt’s chest.

“Hey, Greg,” Wirt says, patting him on the head with his unoccupied hand. “What’s going on? Why the warm welcome?” Greg’s head pops up to meet Wirt’s eyes. He wears a wide, excited smile.

“Guess what I found, Wirt!”

“What?”

“A door in the alley! It goes through the big wall!”

A shock goes through Wirt. It’s of the same possessed, desperate sort that had gripped him when Whispers had mentioned the Doctor Adelaide. He _wants_, he _needs_, and it is not him who says “Show me.” Not him who follows after Greg like a dog. It’s this singular desire to be there, to meet her, to see close-up the affliction that’s made her sprout her cursed feathers. He wants to know every inch of her, the human and bird skin, he wants to know which parts are beast and which are girl. He wants to know which part wins.

Beast or girl?

He follows Greg back out the door and around the side of the brownstone and into the alleyway, and as they slip into the shadow between wall and building, Wirt fancies he can smell the freshness of the garden already, a stark contrast to the sick-sweet scent of the florist’s, the dreary, gag-worthy odor of the street.

Almost at the end of the alley, but not quite, Greg stops in front of a short stretch of wall. “Here,” he says, and Wirt looks but can’t see what he might be referring to.

“Greg, I don’t—” he starts, but doesn’t get the chance to finish, because Greg has reached out and grasped something in a crevice of stone, and suddenly the brick is pulling back from itself. Whatever lever Greg had pulled was hidden at a child’s height. Clever.

“Oh,” Wirt says as the garden comes into view. In the late afternoon light, and from a ground perspective rather than a high view, the place seems suddenly far more overgrown than he’d thought it was. It’s like forest, unmapped, undiscovered, unknown. Despite Greg being the one to find it, and despite his vivid curiosity, he lets Wirt enter first, and Wirt feels like he’s stepping through a portal. “Incredible,” he whispers.

He was right about the air here. As he moves further in, away from the entrance to the alley, the stale air there grows less and less noticeable. The garden has a freshness to it impossible to find in the city, a freshness that reminds him of their old country house, and he breathes in as though he’s never breathed before.

Whatever awful thing he’d glimpsed here, in the dead of night, it doesn’t reach for him. An indescribable peace instead fills him up, and he steps forward, picking his way over roots and vines. It had seemed like an impossible hopscotch, looking down from his window, but on the ground a grace he didn’t know he had overtakes his footsteps, and it’s with no real effort that he glides down the path, growing ever closer to the center of the garden.

When it comes into sight, that cracked effigy and the growth that sprouts from it, it’s not the tree he focuses on. Instead it’s her, Beatrice, standing before the fountain, reaching out to run a hand along the bark, trace the petals of one blossom. Her eyes are narrowed, looking at it, and her touch, though delicate, is not loving. She looks at the plant like mistrust. Like an enemy.

Her feathers, up close, are even more awful-beautiful than they had been from his previous view. They have the same intricacy of pattern and hue that a true bird’s does, and the beds they sprout from are essentially invisible, so smooth is the transition from skin to feather. Around her face, those feathers that sprout there intermingle with her hair, so that it is hard to discern where one starts and the other ends.

From here, Wirt can actually see her face, and somehow she seems smaller than he expected. Younger. He had looked upon her deformities and thought her grand, great, a creature in the garden, but this girl is hardly more than a child. Seventeen, perhaps. A year younger than him.

“Hello, Beatrice,” he says, and becomes acutely aware of the flowers still grasped in his left hand.

She starts, whipping around to face him, blinking owlishly at his presence.

“What are you doing here?” she whisper-yells, astounded. Then, almost as if an afterthought, she adds on, “Who are you?” Wirt opens his mouth, which goes dry, suddenly unsure of what to say or how to proceed. 

“We live in the house next door!” Greg butts in, and Wirt had forgotten he was here, so enchanted by her. “We’re your neighbors and we found a door into the garden and decided to break in.”

“Greg!” Wirt hisses, though unsure how he’d explain it better than that.

She looks between them, mouth open, about to say something, but Greg cuts her off, saying, “You have _feathers_.” Wirt blushes, somehow, at Greg’s obtuse observation. She remains looking stern for a short moment before her lip curls in a reluctant grin, and a laugh bubbles out of her.

“Yes,” she says, chuckling, bringing a hand to her face. “Yes, I do. Greg, was it?”

“Yes ma’am!”

“You’re cute.”

“Thank you, bird lady! Can I play in your garden?”

“Sure. Just don’t touch the edelwood.”

“Yes sir, absolutely sir,” he responds, knowing full well that he doesn’t have any clue what edelwood is, and knowing that Wirt also knows he doesn’t know, and before anyone can stop him, he scampers off down a path branching away from the fountain.

Beatrice turns to Wirt. “Brothers?”

“Ah, yes. Sorry to… break in.”

“It’s alright. It gets lonely here; I could use the company, as long as you’re not here to murder me.” She steps away from the fountain, closer to him. “I’m surprised you’re even still here, though. I was sure anyone who saw me would run screaming for the hills.”

“No!” Wirt blurts, then winces. “No, I mean, I just—” he slaps his free palm to his face. “I’ve seen you before, from my window. You’re…” and he trails off, unsure whether he wants to say _beautiful_ or _strange_.

“Weird?” she prompts, raising an eyebrow. She seems resigned to the self-deprecation, and that more than anything weighs Wirt’s scale one way.

“No. You’re gorgeous.” There’s a moment after he says it that they just stand there. Then his face goes cherry red, and he starts spluttering, and Beatrice grins, a faint pinkness rising to her cheeks, too, and she laughs.

“What’s your name?”

“Wirt.”

“I’m Beatrice.”

“Yeah, I know.” She raises an eyebrow, and Wirt starts to splutter again, backtracking. “I mean, I heard—when Adelaide called you into the garden a couple days ago, I heard her… say your name.” He looks determinedly at the ground, embarrassment making his ears go hot. “So, yeah.”

“You know the Doctor?” Her voice is sharp, and Wirt looks up. Her eyes are narrowed.

“Not really. I only know her name because my stepfather works at the University, and she’s kind of infamous there. Plus we’re neighbors.”

“Oh,” she says, relaxing. Wirt hadn’t noticed it at first, but watching her feathers settle, he realizes they must have fluffed up in her alarm. _Cute_, he thinks, not totally aware that he thinks it. He steps forward, closer to her and the fountain, and looks briefly over the scenery. The central area they stand in is more open than the rest of the garden, cobblestone path encircling the broken fountain. Paths break off and head toward each corner.

“What are the flowers for?” she asks him, and he remembers suddenly the forget-me-nots clutched in his hand. He brings them up to look at them, finding the stems bent from his grip.

“Oh. They were, uh. For you.”

“For me?”

“Yeah, I, uh. It seems kind of stupid now. I just—I saw you from my window and I thought—” he shuts up, meeting her eyes, seeing the teasing gaze there. “Sorry.”

She reaches out, uncurls his fingers, and takes the flowers. “They’re nice. Thank you, Wirt.” Then she giggles to herself and says, “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too, Beatrice.”

She takes a step backward, and her foot hits a great, thick root, tripping her, and her arms windmill as she tries to get her balance back. Wirt reaches out and grips her arm to steady her, expecting the weight of a normal human about her size, but to his surprise, she’s much lighter than that. It’s as though her bones are hollow. Grabbing on to less weight than he expected sets him off-balance, too, and they both crash to the ground, a short yelp escaping Wirt’s lips.

He sits up, rubbing his head. Then he catches sight of Beatrice, also wincing, and he says, “Oh, I’m so sorry! I thought—” but she cuts him off when she waves a hand dismissively.

“It’s fine, it’s my fault, I tripped.” She looks at the ground between them and her eyebrows knit together. “Oh, no.” Wirt looks down, and there lying innocently on the ground are what must be the flowers. Instead of being comprised of stem and petal, however, it’s like they were carved from wood—each curve, each divot, even the bent angle of the stems replicated.

“How did…?” he wonders, bewildered. Beatrice’s face twists solemnly.

“It’s the edelwood. It infects the organic things that touch it. This garden was constructed of plants immune to it, so that it could hide in plain sight. The Doctor wanted to be the only one to study it.” An alarm crosses her face. “Oh, gods! Did you touch it? The roots?”

Wirt looks down at himself. He’s sitting up, propped by his hands, and the roots crisscross the paths all around them, but impossibly his hands rest on bare stone. “No,” he says, pulling his hands to his chest. He stands without again touching the ground, thanking his choice to have worn long pants today. “No, I didn’t.”

She looks at him, concerned but relieved. “Good. Everything seems to react differently to the infection and, ah, the Doctor has not been so cruel as to force a person to touch it yet.” A new alarm sparks in her. “Oh, your brother! He wouldn’t know what edelwood is, would he? Oh, I’m so stupid. Greg? Greg!” She stands and begins walking in the direction Greg had disappeared, calling his name, a frantic energy to her words.

Though concern for Greg beats in his heart, Wirt is rooted to the spot for a moment, perplexed, watching her retreating back. The silhouette of her seems more creature than human, those feathers sticking out. If no one can touch the edelwood, how did she harvest its parts? How did she take those samples?

Then concern outweighs his suspicion, and he breaks after her, calling, “Greg? Greg?”

They find him a few minutes later in a far part of the garden, where the edelwood’s roots have not yet grown to reach. He’s crouched down, talking to a frog, which croaks indifferently in response. Relief crashing in Wirt, he just watches the exchange, amused.

“Oh, wow,” Beatrice says, her breath like air. “I’m surprised that frog is still alive.”

Greg looks up, suddenly enthused. “Can I keep it?”

“Greg—” Wirt begins, but Beatrice cuts him off.

“You probably should. If it stays in here, it’ll eventually end up touching the edelwood. Not a good end for a frog.” She smiles down at the creature, which croaks with the same indifference. “You should give it a name.”

“Ooh, it’ll be… Kitty! Wait, no that’s dumb. How about Wirt Junior?”

“Greg, don’t name a frog after me.”

“Okay. Then… George Washington. No, he’s not dressed like a President. Benjamin Franklin? No…” Greg keeps muttering to himself, which Wirt tunes out as he turns to Beatrice.

“I’m sorry again to intrude, and cause so much trouble,” he says, but, looking at her, he remembers the suspicion that had crept in. “Uh… can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

He’s not sure that addressing it directly is the best idea, but he doesn’t have any other plan. “Why can you touch the edelwood?”

She doesn’t question how he knew she could. Instead, she looks at the ground, a tight look crossing her face. “I… that’s the reason that I look the way I do,” she tells him. Then, glancing at Greg, she reaches out to tug him away. When they’re out of earshot, she says, “I wasn’t always like this. I was a normal girl before I met the Doctor. There was an ad in the paper looking for a young person to do some labor, and at the time I was determined to help support my family. When I came, she told me I’d be helping her look after the garden, and I was okay with that. Then I fell unconscious somehow, and when I woke up, I looked like this.” She sighs. “I’ve never left because I don’t want to go back to my family looking like this. If I tried to, though, I feel like she’d stop me.”

“How does that…?”

“Whatever she did to me, it prevents the edelwood from infecting me. From what I’ve read of her notes, the feathers and my eyes and bones are just a side effect.” She rubs at her temple. “I’ve been sneaking into her study practically every night, looking for a way to reverse it, but I haven’t found anything yet. It’s been almost a year.”

“I’m… so sorry, Beatrice. I didn’t know.” He feels ashamed, suddenly, of how quickly he’d suspected her. How quickly she’d become bird more than girl.

“It’s okay. You two should probably go, though. The Doctor will be coming through soon, to check on all the plants.”

Wirt’s silent for a moment, then says, “Can we come back?”

She meets his eyes, and he’s reminded again of how strange, how utterly inhuman they are: wholly black, sclera and iris and pupil indistinguishable. They’re like dark pits, and in a bird it’s almost cute, but in human-shaped eyes, those discerning ovals, it’s unsettling.

“I’d love if you did,” she tells him, smiling, and the emotion he can see in the curve of her mouth is enough, to him, to make up for it.

<> 

His life gains a new routine, after that, Beatrice included. Five days a week, he works at Endigrey, delivering flowers across the city. Deliveries stop at four-thirty in the afternoon, and at that point he goes home, where Greg waits for him, having gotten home from school two hours earlier. They go together into the garden, where Greg runs off to play with the frog he had, indeed, taken home, while Wirt talks with Beatrice. After a few hours, they leave, and so on and so forth.

It’s a Thursday, two weeks after they’d first spoken, and all day—half of yesterday, too—the people he’s delivering to have been commenting on his eyes. Most compliment him, though the more recent deliveries have been studying him with strange expressions. On his most recent return to Endigrey, he declined at first to accept the next bundle, instead beelining for the restroom.

Gazing in the mirror, desperately examining his own eyes, he doesn’t at first notice what people have been commenting on. Then the light flickers, the room’s lamp running out of oil, and Wirt sees it—a flash of it—and he knows instantly what his customers had been catching glimpse of, in the shadows of their doorstep.

His eyes are glowing, that same haunting, blue-white-yellow-pink shimmer that had gazed at him from the garden in the night.

It’s very slight, almost imperceptible; it’s more a highlight than anything, certainly not that bright, shining lantern that beast of a tree’s blooms had been. But it is there. Even in the light he can see it, knowing it’s there, and it tints the whites of his eyes, distorts the brown of his irises. He can see how people would think it was beautiful, but to him, it is a sentencing.

Oh, gods. He must have touched the edelwood, back then when he fell, if only a faint brush of his finger.

Wirt runs a hand through his hair, some distant shock overtaking him, and is thrown into disarray all over again when he feels something _hard_ beneath his hair, just past his temple.

Alarmed once again, he turns his head and reaches up to part his hair, looking at his scalp in the mirror. There, brown and blending in with his locks, is a twisted, gnarled branch, protruding from his skin. It doesn’t hurt or even ache; there had been no warning of it. It sits there like it’s natural, like it’s meant to be, and yet the sight of it, the feeling of it beneath his fingertips is enough to make Wirt want to hurl. When Beatrice said the edelwood reacted differently to different organisms, he hadn’t dreamed it could do something like this.

There’s a second protrusion mirroring the first, on the other side of his head, and a vision comes to him: when fully grown, they’ll look like antlers.

Chuckling somewhat to himself, in a gasping, desperate kind of way, he listens to Endicott’s voice sound from the shop. “Wirt? You alright in there, nephew?” He’s grown quite fond of Wirt, calls him nephew as a form of affection. “You have one more delivery before you can go home, you know.”

“Uh—haha—” the laugh is borne of a franticness he doesn’t know how to compartmentalize “—yeah, I know! I’ll be out in a second!” He quickly, but meticulously, spreads his hair over the protrusions again, determined to keep them hidden. When he emerges into the shop, he keeps his eyes downcast, not meeting Fred’s eyes when he takes the latest bouquet.

“It’s Dr. Whispers’ house, on Ulysses. You live on Pasture, next to the shop, right? It’s two blocks up from us.”

“Yeah, got it,” he mumbles, and leaves, looking firmly at the road as he goes. He knows where Professor Whispers’ house is. His stepfather has taken them to hers for dinner twice now. Wirt wonders if perhaps she ordered flowers because she knew Wirt is the delivery boy, wonders what she could possibly want with him.

When she opens the door, she is not surprised to see him.

_That hypothesis proven correct, then,_ Wirt thinks, and holds out the bouquet.

“What’re they for?” he asks, attempting to avoid whatever she wants to talk about.

“Oh, my niece Lorna has a music performance tonight. They’re for her,” Whispers says, brushing it off. “But Wirt, since you’re here, I had something I wanted to tell you.”

“What?”

She opens her mouth, then pauses, a confused look crossing her face. “Do you hear… creaking?” she wonders aloud, and Wirt freezes, for he is suddenly, awfully conscious of it. It’s him. _He’s_ creaking, like the garden did. Like that tree, that beast.

After a moment, she dismisses the sound. “No matter. It’s about the Doctor Adelaide’s ward. You know her, don’t you?” Wirt looks up, forgetting the state of his eyes, forgetting himself entirely.

“What about her?” he asks, and in his sudden desperation, he does not see the way Whispers’ eyes widen, meeting his gaze. They do not widen in surprise.

“You do. This will be all the easier, then.” From the pocket of her dress, Whispers pulls a pair of ornate scissors, the handle gold, molded into the image of a bird, its beak the blades. “These scissors—I stole them from my sister the last time we visited. They can remove those feathers from Beatrice, return her to her true, human state, I am certain of it. You must snip them away and help her escape, else she may never return to her family.” She presses the scissors into Wirt’s hands, and as he looks down at them, astonished, he does not see Whispers’ triumphant grin.

“I’ll do it,” Wirt says, resolve building in him. He looks up at the professor, determined. “I will.”

“Go, then, boy,” she advises him, and he heads off, stopping only briefly at Endigrey to drop off her payment and stow away his apron.

Thursday is one of the few days he and Greg do not usually go down to the garden, as Greg is involved with a group from his school who do community service work, and gets home much later. Somehow apprehensive to go alone, he sits in his room and bounces his leg, anxiously awaiting his brother’s return. At seven o’clock, just as the sun is setting, the front door finally opens and slams back closed, and Wirt leaps from his bed, heading down the stairs with a vigor most unusual for him. He presses his hand to his thigh, where the scissors are concealed in one pocket, to remind himself that they’re still there.

His mother and Greg’s father are yet not home, and he’s thankful for that, for Greg, at least, he is not afraid to look in the eye.

“Greg,” he says, approaching the boy, who is busying himself with hanging his coat on a rack slightly too tall for him to reach. “Greg, we need to go see Beatrice.” He takes the coat from Greg and holds it out, urging him to put it back on.

“But we never go on Thursdays,” he protests, confused. Wirt shakes his head.

“Today we have to. Something happened.”

“Is it your eyes?” he asks, looking between Wirt’s eyes. “And your branchlers?”

“My branchlers…?” he trails off, a horror growing in him. He reaches up, and, sure enough, the nubs of wood have already grown past a concealable length. They stick out about three inches, twisted and intricate in their growth. “Oh, god. Yes… yes, that’s why we’re going.”

He had forgotten about his new features, or at least to look for a way to be rid of them, in his haste to cure Beatrice. But while they are there, he _must_ find a way to fix himself. There must be a method.

Without more dawdling, Wirt lights a lantern and leads them out into the alleyway, through the doorway, and into the dark garden. The setting sun does not reach past the towering wall that surrounds the garden, and so the lantern is all that lights their way, and as Wirt enters, the roots and vines that had before seemed so easy to step between catch his feet with every motion. This is no longer an enchanted place, but a cursed one, and from the darkness Wirt imagines a thousand malevolent things watching him, waiting.

He and Greg reach the center of the garden eventually, Wirt clutching Greg’s hand tight in his own. Every time Greg trips up, he stills and grips him to keep him steady, terrified that Greg might meet his same fate. He should’ve gone alone after all, when the sun was still up. To keep Greg from any chance of infection.

The flowers glow the same way they had that first night Wirt had seen them bloom, and as they approach the marble fountain, Wirt feels as though the blossoms turn to watch him, like eyes. He feels as though he’s in a thousand spotlights. He hears the creaking, all around them, enveloping the garden, the roots of this plant-beast reaching out, creeping across the cobblestones and through the soil. He hears it thrum in him, twining upward from some central point in himself, reaching out through his temples, twisting into antler-like branches.

Yes, he can feel it growing now, out and upward. His… branchlers, as Greg had called them, growing ever bigger.

He’s about to draw in a breath with which to call for Beatrice when a shape emerges from the dark, squinting in his direction.

“Oh my goodness, _Wirt_,” he hears, and it’s Beatrice stepping into his lantern light, looking at him like he’s suffered some horrible injury. “Oh, no, no-no-no,” she moans, moving forward, bringing hands up to cup his face. “When did you touch it? I’m so sorry.”

“Beatrice?” he speaks, and his voice sounds dry. “Why are you out here? I was about to call you.”

“The Doctor wanted me to sample some of the petals at night, to see if they still glow disconnected from the main plant. God, Wirt, what are you doing here? When did this happen?”

“It must have started a while ago. The only time I might’ve touched the tree is when we fell; my hand must’ve brushed a root. It sort of explains why it took so long.” He lets go of Greg’s hand to bring up to his face, turning it over to examine his palm and the back. “Nothing seems to have changed except for the… the branches, and my eyes.”

Beatrice looks him over, regret on her face. “I never should’ve let you stay. If I’d turned you away in the first place, this never would’ve happened. Oh, Wirt, I’m so sorry,” she says again, her voice cracking.

“It’s not your fault, Beatrice,” he murmurs, stepping closer to her, letting the hand that holds the lantern fall to his side so he can be as close as he can. “I chose to come in the first place.” He lowers his gaze, looking at their feet, illuminated in the swinging, changing light of the lantern.

On the ground, he notices movement where there shouldn’t be. Alarmed, he swings the lantern out, chasing the snaking something, and in a short catch of light he finds that it’s—it’s a _root_.

“Oh, what on Earth,” he says, surprised, when a thought occurs to him. “Greg!” He’d let his brother’s hand go in his contemplation, and now he turns all the way around, holding the lantern out, looking for him. “Greg!”

“Greg?” Beatrice calls, joining him. They pause between each call, wandering around the circumference of the marble fountain. Eventually, they hear a muffled kind of groan, and both bolt toward it.

It’s Greg, just hidden in the line of plants at the edge of the path that circles the fountain. He’d been nigh-totally camouflaged, entrapped as he is by the edelwood that surrounds him, growing into him.

“_Greg_,” Wirt cries, darting forward, caring no longer about touching the wood. He claws at it, scraping his palms, a desperation overcoming him. He remembers all too suddenly that they’d never actually told Greg what the edelwood was, so caught up in relief that he was alright. They’d never told him why he shouldn’t touch it. “Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Beatrice joins him in his scrabbling, the lanternlight swinging violently, Wirt holding it on his wrist, having slipped the metal handle over his hand to keep it free. She pulls back a moment, distraught, and happens to see the roots near Greg’s feet.

They’re snaking toward him, trying to wrap around him, but every time the light shines on them too intensely, they recoil.

“Wirt!” she cries, grabbing at his shoulder. “Wirt, it doesn’t like light!” Wirt stops in his frantic motions, looking down at the roots. He swings the lantern toward them, and watches them twist away. His brows curl forward, and he presses his lips together in a white line.

“I’ll bet it doesn’t like fire even more,” he says darkly, stalking backward, toward the fountain. The very tree seems to feel his intent, and shies backward, but it is so tightly rooted to its place in the center of the fountain that it is not able to lean more than a few inches away. It tries to trip him up, but the roots that reach for him are too afraid to come near the light, and he walks unimpeded to the fountain.

He steps up onto the marble, the lantern clutched tightly in his grip. Then he steps down, into the fountain, toward the tree. The beast.

“Fuck you,” he says, meeting the eyes of the tree—for that’s what those two, great buds must be. This thing can hear and see and think, and it’s these eyes he meets, his own shining bright like beacons in the dark, the rings of color he’d been growing now completely defined. He stands, and they are like mirrors of each other.

It’s these eyes he meets as he dashes the lantern against the trunk, the oil splattering up the wood, the lit flame catching.

The beast bursts into flame, and it _screeches_, the roots that extend from it writhing with pain. They uncurl from Greg, and it seems that every tendril spread across the garden pulls inward, toward the center trunk, jerking and trembling with agony. Wirt stands on the marble, watching it, heat so intense he feels his eyelashes may catch.

“Wirt! Get back from there!” Beatrice cries, but he’s not listening.

“Wirt?” It’s Greg’s voice, weak and confused, that draws him from his vengeful haze, and he scrambles out of the fountain, back to his companions as the fire eats up and down the tree, slowly spreading toward the roots. The blossoms that dot its branches blacken and curl, dropping. The beast’s eyes have long become ash.

“Greg? Are you okay?” Wirt asks desperately, reaching for Greg, holding his shoulders gently. The boy is on his knees, pale, trembling.

“I think so. I’m cold.” A jolt of fear shoots through Wirt at this. They’re next to a blazing fire. Why is he cold?

“Why is he cold?” he’s saying, repeating, mumbling, and it’s Beatrice’s sweet touch to his shoulder that saves him from his panic.

“He’ll be okay, he’s just in shock.” She looks down at him, then back to the fire. “Wirt, why did you come here?”

He looks up at her, dumbfounded that this could be what she’s focusing on. But it gives him something to hold on to, something to answer, and he finds himself replying even despite his incredulity. “I… Professor Whispers gave me these,” he says, bringing out the scissors. “She said that if you snip your feathers away with it, you’ll be a normal girl again.”

Beatrice gasps, and those dark, pits of eyes shimmer with something Wirt can finally recognize. Disbelief. Relief.

“Oh, Wirt, you wonderful, stupid boy.”

Just then, they hear a broken cry. It comes from the archway that leads to the Doctor Adelaide’s brownstone, and when they look up, they see her silhouette there, gazing upon the burning garden with horror.

“What have you _done_, boy?” she screams, looking Wirt in the eye. “You’ve ruined it! Ruined the entire experiment!”

“Experiment…?” Wirt repeats.

Adelaide doesn’t answer, a laugh, hysterical, bubbling up from her throat. “So be it then! You’ll never be rid of those eyes, child. You can cut back the wood, shave it down to your skull, but unless you blind yourself you’ll never stop glowing!” She cackles, and in the bright, flickering light of the fire, she looks rabid.

“Give me those scissors,” Beatrice says, as dark as Wirt’s voice had been when he’d resolved to burn the beast.

He hands them over wordlessly. Adelaide, in her laughter, does not see the weapon change hands.

Beatrice stalks toward her, steps even now that only thin vines litter the cobblestone. Her stance is powerful, prowling, and to Wirt, she seems less a bird and more a tiger. Adelaide seems less the predator and more the prey.

“I hate you,” Beatrice shouts halfway to her. Adelaide stops laughing, and looks at her.

“Girl, I _made_ you.”

“Yeah, you did. And now _I_ can unmake me.” She stops a few feet from Adelaide, and holds up the scissors, the gold glinting in the firelight. “Recognize these?”

Adelaide’s eyes widen. “How did you—? Give me those!” she cries, lunging forward, but Beatrice is quicker, lighter. She darts away.

It’s then that the fire licks high enough to illuminate the top of the walls, and Wirt notices there, stood atop the brick that lines the street, an old, fat silhouette. In the firelight, Professor Whispers’ face is illuminated, and the expression on her face is victorious.

“Not so smart now, huh, you old broad?” She calls down to Adelaide, cackling. The Doctor gasps, looking at Whispers like betrayal, and it’s at this moment that Beatrice strikes.

Her feathers flash, that same alluring mix of blue and orange that Wirt had been enchanted by when she’d caught the sunlight the first time he’d seen her. He is absolutely intoxicated by her in the moment she drives the scissors home, buried deep in Adelaide’s gut.

Without lingering, Beatrice rips the scissors back out, leaving the woman to flop to the cobblestones, staining them red, blood gurgling in her throat. She turns away, not bothering to watch the Doctor Adelaide die. When Wirt looks back, Whispers is gone.

“Come on, Wirt,” Beatrice says to him. “Take me out of the garden.”

<> 

After they flee the fire, all the other plants now catching, things proceed like this: Wirt carries Greg on his back, and Beatrice follows them back into the brownstone next door. Wirt cleverly avoids explaining anything to his mother, back from wherever she’d been all day, by shutting and locking his door upstairs before she could catch sight of any of them. Then, they step back, and figure out what to do with themselves.

First, Wirt and Beatrice gently lay Greg in Wirt’s bed. Beatrice steals across the hall to the washroom to wet a cloth to lay on his forehead, and they let him fall asleep, hopefully to shake off the shock of having roots grow into you. To that end, they undress him and check his body for any lingering wood or plant matter, and find, to their relief, that there is none. Greg’s reaction to the infection was simple, and now that its source has been cut off, he’s fine and wholly human.

Then, at Wirt’s insistence, they ignore his branches and eyes and focus on Beatrice. She still carries the scissors, bloodstained, and she takes a moment to just look at them, before bringing them to the base of the first feather, one that extends out from her wrist. She snips it, as close to the skin as she can get.

To their shared amazement, as the feather falls, the bed that it had grown from pushes outward, falling from her flesh and leaving smooth skin in its place.

“Oh, wow,” she says, unable to get anything else out. She and Wirt share an excited glance, and as they do, he notices that from the corners of her eyes, the white sclera that should be there is beginning to become visible.

As she works, Beatrice finds out that snipping off any part of the feather will make the whole thing, bed and all, fall out, and with excitement she chops off only the tips of each protrusion, watching them fall with utter glee. She manages to do the ones up and down her arms, on her breast—or, at least, the skin her dress exposes—and on her shoulders. Wirt clips off the ones around her face and in her hair, painstakingly searching her scalp for any lingering feathers. When there only remains feathers beneath her clothes, Wirt politely faces a corner for her to undress, and she does everything that she can on her own. It’s with her bottom half sort-of in the dress, and the fabric of its torso pressed to her front, that she calls him from the corner to snip away what lingers on her back.

When she’s free and fully clothed again, her eyes, Wirt finds, are hazel. And she has freckles. And his floor is absolutely _littered_ with feathers.

She meets his eyes, iris and sclera and pupil all distinct, and he grins. And she grins. And they both laugh like children, reaching out and clutching at each other, holding each other at the elbows. Laughing.

“I feel so heavy,” she says, beaming at him. “I forgot what it was like.”

“You have really pretty eyes,” he tells her, and she blushes, and grins, and throws her arms around him.

Her face in his neck, he feels her deflate a little. “Wirt, you know I don’t know how to fix you, right?” she asks, her voice muffled against his collar.

“I know, Beatrice.”

“Do you hate me for making you like this?”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Still?”

He pulls back, looking her in the eyes. “I don’t hate you.” She looks between his eyes before smiling, though it’s a sad smile.

“Okay.” She steps back, looking around. Her gaze alights on the scissors, discarded on Wirt’s desk. She strides to them and picks them up. “Do you want to cut down the branches, at least?”

“Ah, yeah. It’s probably for the best.” He nods, and moves to sit in the chair at the desk, turning so she has access to the first branch. As she moves to press the open blade of the scissor against the wood, as close to his scalp as she can without hurting him, ready to begin sawing, he leans back and asks, “Do you think it’ll hurt?”

She blinks. “I don’t know.”

They stand still, for a moment.

“Do it,” he says.

<> 

It hurts. It hurts every single time he has to file his branchlers down, as he’s grown to call them at Greg’s insistence. The nubs leak sap for a while after filing like a scrape leaks blood before it scabs over, and it throbs like a scrape, too. Wirt has a near-permanent headache, these days.

It’s worth it not to be a shut-in, though. He can’t stand the thought, frankly. He doesn’t want to end up like Beatrice did, stuck in a garden with four walls, unable to go out into the world. So he files his branchlers down and grows his hair out to hide them and he wears these thick, dark sunglasses to hide his eyes and he doesn’t meet anyone after sunset if it’s not his family for their glow.

It’s kind of awful, but it kind of isn’t, too, because Wirt understands plants like he hadn’t before. He quits his job at Endigrey, for as lovely as the couple are, he can’t stand the sight of so many cut flowers, and instead takes up work as a caretaker at a local garden. Playing there while he works, Greg settles on naming the frog Jason Funderberker, which Wirt abhors at first, but grows to be fond of.

Beatrice moves in with his family for the few months before he decides to finally, finally buy his own place, under the guise that she was kicked out by her father. She finds she isn’t quite ready, yet, to return to her own family. Somehow she’s afraid. Not one to push people, Wirt readily agrees to let her stay with them. And when Wirt finally puts his name on the lease of a small apartment across the street from his garden, Beatrice goes with him. It’s a friends thing, sort of. They’re not sure what to be just yet.

Beatrice takes up botany, but not in the way Adelaide had. She mixes medicines with a kindness in mind, and though she doesn’t say so to Wirt, he knows she does it in hopes she’ll find a way to cure him someday.

And that, if not being truly rid of his eyes and branchlers, is enough for him. That she’s there. That she tries.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so so much if you've read this far!!!! this was a work of passion bc i just read Rappaccini's Daughter for my essay seminar & i loved it. the girl's name being beatrice was definitely the connection that sparked the idea for this AU, but they all fit super well. how could i not have written it??
> 
> if you liked it, please leave a comment. they mean the world to me.


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